James Esber           hummel sandwich, 2001 acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches         mermaid avenue, 2002 acrylic on styrene 74 x 54 inches           thimbleton, 2003 acrylic on styrene 100 x 69 inches           hummel boy / muscle man, 2002 plasticine approx. 40 x 40 inches               gowanus, 2003 plasticine on canvas 56 x 83 inches           toledo bend, 2003 plasticine on canvas 104 x 58 inches             yankee boulevard, 2003 acrylic on styrene 84 x 72 inches   Press Release In his new work, James Esber continues to address notions of distortion, stereotyping, and perception. For this exhibition, his fifth one-person show in New York, Esber intentionally exploits a variety of media (plasticine, painting and work on paper) and a wide range of appropriated icons (from the flag raisers on Iwo Jima to Michael Jackson) to disrupt our preconceived notions of reality. As Ken Johnson writes, “Like the paintings of Peter Saul and Philip Guston, these viscerally sensuous works plumb the polymorphously perverse depths of the American psyche.” (The New York Times) Esber’s tendency is to use unnatural materials and unexpected juxtapositions to show how we perceive and portray things in distorted ways. Robert Storr describes Esber’s style of juxtaposition as a kind of “clunky elegance.” “...[B]oth the clunkiness and the elegance are the product of an imagination keyed to contradiction, and of a talent capable of calibrating the artifice to produce both effects with apparently natural unnaturalness.” (Storr, 2006)
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